Читать книгу The Memoir and the Memoirist - Thomas Larson - Страница 6

How strange that all

The terrors, pains, and early miseries,

Regrets, vexations, lassitudes interfused

Within my mind, should e’er have borne a part,

And that a needful part, in making up

The calm existence that is mine when I

Am worthy of myself! Praise to the end!

—William Wordsworth, The Prelude

“Oh, ’Tis Me That Is Wounded”

—Scottish fiddle tune

Art would not be important were life not more important.

—James Baldwin

Once I had dressed, made up, done my hair and tidied the house, if I still had some time left, I would be incapable of reading or marking essays. In a way, too, I didn’t want my mind to concentrate on anything else but the wait itself, in order not to spoil it. Quite often I would write down on a sheet of paper the date, the time and “he’s going to come,” along with other sentences, fears—that he might not come, that he might not feel the same desire for me. In the evening I would go back to the sheet of paper, “he came,” jotting down the details of that meeting at random. Then, dazed, I would stare at the scrawls on the paper and the two paragraphs written before and after, which one read in succession without a break. In between there had been words and gestures which made everything else seem trivial, including the very writing destined to capture them. An interval of time squeezed in between two car noises—his Renault 25 braking, then driving off again—when I knew that nothing in my life (having children, passing exams, traveling to faraway countries) had ever meant as much to me as lying in bed with that man in the middle of the afternoon.

It would only last for a few hours. I never wore my watch, removing it just before he arrived. He would keep his on and I dreaded the moment when he would glance at it discreetly. When I went into the kitchen to get some ice, I would look up at the clock hanging above the door: “only two more hours,” “only one more hour,” or “in one hour I’ll be here and he’ll be gone.” Astonished I asked myself: “Where is the present?”

He would dress slowly before leaving. I would watch him button up his shirt, put on his socks, his underpants, his trousers, then turn towards the mirror to fasten his tie. After he had put on his jacket, it would all be over. Now I was only time flowing through myself.

—Annie Ernaux, Simple Passion